Pantomimes and Other Surreal Tales
Paul Margueritte
Translated by Brian Stableford
Paul Margueritte (1860-1918), though principally remembered today as a writer of Naturalist fiction and for his scandalous novel Tous quatre (1885), did, during a period when he was writing for the Écho newspaper, have a brief experimental phase during which he produced a series of proto-surrealist tales, as well as dabbling in weird and supernatural fiction.
The items in the present volume, all of which are translated into English for the first time by Brian Stableford, include the most distinctive of his narrative experiments, in which he attempted to adapt the substance of his early pantomimes to the format of short fiction. These pieces, which revel in their own idiosyncrasy even when sometimes pretending to a strict naturalism and a conventional sentimentality, are also capable of a casual brutality uncommon even in the cynical medium of the conte cruel.
The stories assembled in this slim collection fully deserve rescue from their obscure origins, and they benefit from being gathered together into a curious set. They remain intriguingly pointed, more than a century after their composition.
About the Author
Paul Margueritte (1860-1918) was the older son of General Jean-Auguste Margueritte, who played a leading role in France’ s colonial conquest of Algeria, where Paul was born. An amateur mime, Paul wrote several pantomimes, most notably Pierrot assassin de sa femme (1881), allegedly first performed in Stéphane Mallarmé’ s salon. In 1885 he published Tous quatre (1885), which caused something of a scandal by virtue of its treatment of lesbianism. Margueritte, along with Paul Bonnetain, J. H. Rosny, Lucien Descaves, and Gustave Guiches, released “The Manifesto of the Five” in Le Figaro in 1887 attacking the alleged vulgarity and cynical commercialism of Émile Zola’s recent novel La Terre.
About the Translator
Brian Stableford has been writing for fifty years. His fiction includes include eleven novels and seven short story collections in a series of “tales of the biotech revolution”; a series of metaphysical fantasies set in Paris in the 1840s, featuring Edgar Poe’s Auguste Dupin, most recently Yesterday Never Dies (2012); and a series of supernatural mysteries set in an artist’s colony, most recently The Pool of Mnemosyne (2018). Recent novels independent of any series include Vampires of Atlantis (2016) and The Tangled Web of Time (2016). He also translates antique works from the French, with particular interests in the Symbolist and Decadent Movements, roman scientifique and the fantastique.
Paperback, 216 pages. Release date: December 5, 2023
ISBN-13: 978-1-64525-145-3
Price: US$19.00